Inside NowThis, the Upstart That's Owning Social News

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Inside NowThis, the Upstart That's Owning Social News

Millennials are the most apathetic generation to ever ironically slouch toward adulthood. Or so say the headlines, which fulminate against their tendency not to vote in droves, preferring instead to spend their time paying rent and "liking" things on social media. Ah, social media, the pundit's other favorite punching bag. Facebook's early days as a pseudo-media outlet have been more thana littlefraught. But everybody might need to relax. Smart, informative, short videos on social media might be key to creating an politically knowledgeable—and hopefully, politically engaged—millennial audience.

Enter NowThis, the left-leaning media startup presenting the news in 22- to 90-second videos hosted across various social media platforms, but especially Facebook and Snapchat. The company has been on the scene for about four years, but this election season it has really found its rhythm, breaking down the issues of the down into bite-sized chunks. If you hadn't heard of the company before, it may sound familiar this week, because President Obama did three NowThis videos on Wednesday to try to convince young people to show up for Hillary Clinton.

The site's numbers are remarkable. Eighty percent of its audience is under the age of 35. NowThis reports that its election coverage videos have racked up about 2 billion views. It has about 4 million social engagement interactions (think shares, likes, comments) per month. And when it livestreamed the third presidential debate the video got about 3 million views total. That's second only to ABC News' stream (and ABC was Facebook's official partner for the event). So NowThis is kind of a big deal, especially with millennials. "We've made a commitment to bringing content to where they live, and millennials live on a social media platform," says Athan Stephanopoulos, president of NowThis.

He's right about that. A recent poll conducted by John Della Volpe, polling director at Harvard's Institute of Politics, found that 80 percent of millennials have Facebook accounts, and about 26 percent report engaging with the presidential campaign on the platform.

22 seconds is the new 22 minutes.

Tina Exarhos

NowThis also covers issues that millennials care about—enough to watch and share short videos on the topic. On social media "you share what represents your viewpoint, and you want to feel smarter and more engaged for what you share," says Tina Exarhos, NowThis' chief content officer. NowThis' focuses on issues like marriage equality, gender equality, climate change, and criminal justice reform, which are exactly the kind of themes millennials are passionate about, according to Della Volpe. And the videos also deliver premium guests. NowThis has had exclusive interviews with millennial favorites like Vice President Joe Biden, and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And it's all delivered in a specially calibrated, accessible voice crafted by NowThis' editorial department—about 60 people, with an average age of just 25.

People are watching. The Biden video got 30 million views. One of the Obama videos from Wednesday has already cracked one million. "Virality isn't a strategy," says Stephanopoulos. But it is an end goal, and to get there NowThis prioritizes speed of production, high volume (typically, about 60 pieces of content per day, and about 2,000 per month), livestream formats that facilitate commenting and conversation, and the digital version of curb appeal. This one means being aware that most people are scrolling through Facebook on their phones with the sound off, so the videos have to be visually appealing independent of the audio. They also can't be too cluttered. Out of these restraints was born NowThis' signature text-on-screen format. Oh, and they've got to be short too, especially for Snapchat, where NowThis have the first-ever election specific channel, We the People. "22 seconds is the new 22 minutes," Exarhos says.

And that makes NowThis important for a few reasons. First, because social media is increasingly becoming the dominant force in the news. "The mainstream media are a herd of elephants. When they're in the room, you know they're there," says Richard Parker, an economist at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. "But the rise of peripheral journalism, especially on social media, is like hyenas nipping and redirecting them all the time." NowThis' approach seems to be to meet people where they are—and to get in and out with a message quickly.

Its popularity hasn't gone unnoticed by the right. Trump supporters even bothered to churn out a fake NowThis video to spread misinformation about the Clintons in advance of the second presidential debate.

But even though its business model depends on producing scads and scads of clickable content, NowThis's mandate from Stephanopoulos is to be informative first, and entertaining second. "When we interviewed the Vice President, we got 30 million views on a policy driven topic. We weren’t sharing a cat video," says Stephanopoulos. "We'd never say you can understand an issue completely after 45 seconds, but we're constantly putting more news into the feed so our audience can continuously build and learn." So hopefully for millennials casting an informed vote will be a snap.